For a while it wasn’t in the US. They now have a cut-down version. But a lot of people use VPNs to access the less-restricted international version. So to answer your question, a lot of users are using it in a way that’s illegal.
I’m formulating plans to switch from AWS to Hetzner. Amazon gets you by charging high prices (sometimes 20x more than competitors) and forcing you to make long-term commitments in order to get the prices to somewhere more reasonable. Then they make it exorbitantly expensive to migrate your data anywhere else. It’s a very customer-hostile approach that I’m tired of at this point.
Amazon might think that they’re locking people in with the egress fees. But they’re also locking people out. As soon as you switch one part to a competitor, the high egress forces you to switch over everything.
It’s going to be complicated to switch, but it’s made easier by the fact that I didn’t fall into the trap of building my platform on Amazon-specific services.
I'm not trying to convince you to stay (I work for neither anymore!), just wanted to note that you can technically request a waiver. I'm not sure how this works in practice though. Like, if you want to leave Athena and move to something on-premise is that enough to have just that workload? Maybe!
Edit: I also didn't follow this at the time, but the AWS wording suggests that the "EU Data Act" is also involved.
This doesn't actually work as advertised. I attempted free data egress from AWS in December. It took them 31 days to respond to my initial ticket. At which point they gave me a multi-page questionnaire to determine eligibility and they also told me I could not begin DTO until 60 days had passed from approval of the questionnaire.
By the time I was allowed "free egress" my cumulative S3 storage charges over the prior 100 days would have roughly matched the cost of egress if I just did so originally.
I'm in the US so the EU Data Act protections don't apply.
Have you tried to use the DTO? I did. They make you fill in a form saying you'll migrate all services (despite the blog post saying that isn't necessary), and then they take up to 12 weeks to make a decision. In my case they rejected it on a formality after 2 weeks and said to try again (the timer starts again).
So in my case that would have been 14 weeks plus the time to migrate away. The egress costs are equivalent to around 17 weeks storage cost. So you save around 1c/gb if they don't find some reason to reject it.
The EU Data Act forbids cloud switching charges, that's why they made these changes (while presenting them as if they cared about customers being charged for switching away):
I switched to Arm and saved a lot and it caused zero issues. Especially if you’re using an interpreted language like Python you shouldn’t have any problems.
Software might not be quite as optimized for Arm as it is for x86, but in practice you probably won’t notice. In fact, Arm might be faster because it doesn’t have hyper-threading so every vCPU is a full core.
I am disappointed that Anthropic seems determined to squander the goodwill they earned from ending their previous contract with the Trump administration, and apparently learned nothing from it.
This is why cryptocurrency will never catch on among the general population: it’s far too easy to lose all your money from either technical mistakes or theft.
We also need more tech-savvy politicians in office. There are a lot of politicians who are expected to legislate on important technology issues that barely know how to use a cellphone.
Working on some improvements to my video platform, https://www.kollaborate.tv . It’s a new video player with side-by-side playback comparison. Claude was really helpful at getting the drift adjustment working because I can push it further than I would be comfortable pushing a human employee in order to get things just right.
The pardon has been abused by almost every president in recent history to pardon their family or associates (as far as I’m aware, Obama is the only one who didn’t, but please correct me if I’m wrong).
GW Bush also probably matches with Obama for your description, though he did commute (but not pardon) Cheney's Chief of Staff, which caused a permanent rift between Bush and Cheney.
He also revoked a pardon when he discovered that one had his father donate large sums to the RNC.
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